How can analytics generate value in SaaS, CRM, HCM, and the proverbial “alphabet soup” of cloud applications? Read below for the “cliff notes” from Pentaho’s recent webinar series on how vendors are leveraging analytics inside a variety of different SaaS (Software-as-a-service) apps.

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Pentaho just wrapped up several webinars with Montclare, a leading provider of SaaS advisory services, on how embedded analytics can benefit SaaS vendors in the Customer Success, Human Capital Management (HCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) categories. One clear trend was that thinking outside the box to incorporate new & novel data sources can create tremendous value for end users. It’s not just about pretty visualizations and dashboards – it’s about insights that bubble up when diverse data is blended together. We’ve broken out some webinar highlights below, and have also created a short summary video for each webinar – see links in each section.

Customer Success with Nick Mehta of Gainsight

Gainsight is a provider of customer success solutions. CEO Nick Mehta stressed that before you can really build process around customer success, you need a data management strategy. This means figuring out where crucial success information lives – whether in CRM, Product usage databases, customer surveys, billing systems, or other places. It also means finding the right way to integrate this information and understanding the data granularity necessary for useful analytics (time frequency, aggregation, etc).

Gainsight’s “at a glance” view of customer base according to risk level (dot color), revenue (y axis), and time since they were signed (x axis)

Big Data is one path for streamlining a data management approach. Gainsight leverages a hierarchical infrastructure, where Hadoop serves as a high-volume raw data store, and NoSQL is used as an operational store for more summarized data, which then connects to a final end-user reporting layer. Data and architecture innovation has allowed Gainsight to create an “at a glance” view of which customers may be at risk (see picture). This resonates with an evolving trend where SaaS vendors are innovating via Big Data architectures to create more powerful, intelligent, & valuable apps for their customers. The Customer Success video can be found here.

HCM with Janice D’Aloia of Mo’mix

Mo’mix is an IT software and services provider that embeds Pentaho Analytics in its Performance Center offering – which it launched to give customers a single view across a variety of enterprise data systems. While self-service analytics and quick deployment helped drive the decision to partner with Pentaho, Mo’mix has really been able to generate value for customers by being able to connect to virtually any data source (ERP, HCM, niche sources, and more), bringing together an end-to-end view that’s accessible to all types of end users, from HR administrators up to the executive level.

Janice went over a few use cases where its clients improved HCM decision-making. In one example, a client discovered that it was missing employee termination reasons in its source systems, and then was able to fix the discrepancy and track the relevant trends at a more granular to reduce voluntary terminations. She also touched on retention use cases that focused on identifying high-performing and at-risk employees. The HCM video can be found here.

CRM & Marketing with Montclare & Pentaho

In this presentation, Kevin Dobbs of Montclare shared some of the analytics-related trends driving CRM & Marketing application adoption – including demand for data insights on a variety of social media channels. This was exemplified in the case of Paytronix, a Pentaho OEM partner that provides online loyalty solutions to restaurants. As part of their deployment, Paytronix integrated social and mobile data sources, as well as Big Data technologies, to help clients optimize campaigns against end customer behavioral data more effectively. At the same time, as they streamlined multi-source data for embedded analytics, Paytronix was also able to reduce ETL processing time by 80%, generating major operational benefits for customers. The CRM & Marketing video can be found here.

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These webinars highlight just a few examples of how application providers across the SaaS/software landscape are striving to deliver new data sources to their customers for additional analytics context and value. You can access the full-length webinar videos here.

The great debate about on-demand solutions versus on-premise software has gone on for about a decade now. The consensus is that the hosted approach is more nimble, much faster to deploy, doesn’t require in-house resources or hardware, but it isn’t quite ready for the big league due to security issues, cloudy information ownership issues, limited functionality, very limited flexibility, closed architectures and a lack of general data scalability. As a result, hosted BI has struggled to gain acceptance.

Well it’s time for a fresh take on this subject – one that finally gets BI where it needs to be. Pentaho has created a hybrid approach, which gives you the best of both worlds – the freedom, flexibility and ease of hosted software in tandem with the security, robustness and scalability of enterprise-grade solutions. This comes in the form of a suite of On-Demand BI subscriptions that put you in the driver seat. Instead of having to live with whatever the provider decides to do with information storage, security and management, you are in complete control over how the hosted solution is deployed and managed. That adds the key element that has been missing – choice. You determine if it is best that the BI application is managed wholly by Pentaho, internally or by both parties.

Those of you with more time or internal resources to commit to the specific BI application initiative can develop and administer the infrastructure yourselves. Alternatively, Pentaho can handle any portion of the deployment or application management, as you determine based on what is best for your organization.

What if you change your mind? No problem. This subscription service is deployed via a virtual image. So if you decide to move your BI Suite on-premise, there are no portability issues to overcome – one of the huge barriers to adoption of traditional hosted solutions. No longer is it problematic to shift from hosted to on-premise or back again. And if you want to add more bandwidth, memory or processing power, it’s quickly and easily added.. How’s that for agility?

Skeptical? Take it for a test drive in our new On-Demand BI evaluation environment. It’s so good that we challenge anyone to provide us with a distinct data set and we’ll get it running within 72 hours with dashboards and relevant KPIs. We’ll even let you access it for three weeks while you explore and expand it.

As Capt Morgan used to say “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”. Pentaho is going full speed as evidenced by the press release we issued this morning giving the community insight into the past quarter and the great momentum happening at Pentaho. Here are just a few highlights from the release:

*This figure represents customers that have purchased an annual subscription to Pentaho Enterprise Edition products, not simply product downloads or the purchase of documentation, training or per-incident support.